How To Overcome Fears When Starting Your Own Project
Becoming an entrepreneur is not easy, and when it comes to taking the big leap we are faced with a lot of typical fears and insecurities. As an entrepreneur and mentor to entrepreneurs, I am going to tell you the secrets that I have learned throughout these years.
Probably the most common fear when starting a business is the fear of not being able to stabilize income and not being able to “sustain” the lifestyle What we want now that we are undertaking. I have seen it hundreds of times, I hear it constantly, and I can tell you that it is normal, and at the same time it can be transcended.
Basically, a change in our way of thinking has to happen, in our mentality or mindset: a shift from the mind of an employee to that of an entrepreneur (or better yet, an entrepreneur). While the employee usually bases his security on the check he receives at the end of the month, the entrepreneur must learn to base his security on his own internal qualities and capabilities. To do this, we must continually work on developing our security, self-esteem, self-confidence, resilience, among other crucial factors. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? Not at all. And the reward? Enormous.
Furthermore, we must understand that when we work for a company, it acts as a “filter” for external reality and its conditions. It is like a veil, which allows the employee to ignore, at least partially, the financial reality of the organization to which he belongs: Did the company have a good month of sales? A bad month? Is there a national, global, or industry-specific crisis? Many of these issues go unnoticed by the employee, but not by the entrepreneur or business owner.
So, if we want to have a guaranteed income “floor”, we must understand that As entrepreneurs we will have to grow several levels above that threshold so that the average income, of an oscillating nature, remains higher than our “minimum acceptable”.
The fear of losing freedom
In my courses for first-time entrepreneurs, this other, very common fear of being imprisoned by all the tasks of one’s own business and thus losing the freedom that, usually and for many, had been one of the main drivers of change at the work level, usually emerges.
The truth is that yes, many times when we start to undertake, we are like the man or woman orchestra. We do everything, everything. But it is also true that if we want to grow we will have to learn to systematize, delegate and supervise. Create structures that work for us. With the help of some mentor guide us, we can accelerate this process and finally access that freedom of time and resources that we dream of when we think about starting a business in the first place.
After all, taking the step to undertake is deciding to remove the ceiling that we had imposed as a limit for our salary, to open ourselves to a reality without limits in which we ourselves can determine how far we want to go. The key here is to develop our strategic thinking to make our time worth more and more: we have to learn to do more with less, or as I usually say: build machinery (companies) to add value to the world while we sleep.
After all, when we have a company we offer a product or service to the world, that is, to our customers, and we establish commitments with them for which they remunerate us monetarily. A little later we began to need help to grow, we hired our first employees and again the responsibility grew. Then the fears of taking charge of all that begin to appear, and if we will be capable, if we really have “entrepreneurial makings.”
Again, it is a recurring theme in my master’s program for entrepreneurs. The truth is that entrepreneurship will bring us face to face with ourselves and how much we really want to do what we are doing, as well as why we are doing it and who we are helping with our product or service. For this reason, it is all the easier to undertake as a result of personal purpose, because it is a point to which we can return to give meaning to what we do and overcome the difficulties of the process. Startups with a clear mission go further and accept greater responsibilities.
Furthermore, entrepreneurship is fabulous for developing our internal capabilities. Yes, at first it may feel like a process of taking more responsibility, but at the end of the day: isn’t that how we grow? In my work as a coach I see it constantly. As we mature, we are able to take on greater responsibilities, sustain with greater ease, and choose our commitments better. Entrepreneurship is a beautiful training for it.
Conclusion: destined to undertake
Finally, I would like to share with you a reflection that I usually make with my students, when I tell them that “we are all destined to undertake.” While I understand that not everyone will end up being an entrepreneur (in fact, only a small percentage will), I say this because I truly believe it: in my own experience and that of others that I have been able to mentor, I have seen that the time to undertake comes when from within our pulse a desire capable of giving the world something different different, something that represents us more intimately, and it almost never happens that the current company we are in is the appropriate medium or superstructure for this.
I mean that, philosophically speaking, we are all called to discover our own structure, one that represents us to contribute our intrinsic value to the world. And that… that is precisely our own company: a platform to contribute, to give. To quote the famous Khalil Gibran: “work is love made visible.”
